She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor Page B

which Matilda’s claim, or that of her young sons, should be disbarred in favour of his own. Moreover, he had made great play of his loyal support of King Henry’s wishes over the succession, vying with his illegitimate cousin Robert of Gloucester to be first among the magnates to swear allegiance to Matildaas Henry’s heir in 1127. His victory in that precedence dispute, and his prominence among the noble oath-takers, now left him vulnerable to dangerous accusations of perjury, something of which his apologists among the chroniclers were all too well aware. (Chief among them, the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani – The Deeds of Stephen – put into the mouth of the dying King Henry a conscience-wracked acknowledgement that the oath had been extorted from his barons, as a basis from which to argue that ‘any forcible exaction of an oath from anyone has made it impossible for the breaking of that oath to constitute a perjury’.)
    But, while legalistic theorising might cast a shadow over Stephen’s pretensions, they were much more plausible in pragmatic and empirical terms. After all, King Henry himself had defied the hereditary claims of an older brother; and Stephen’s character and experience suggested that he might be capable of emulating his royal uncle in more ways than one. By now in his early forties, a decade older than his cousin Matilda, Stephen had made his career at Henry’s court. His uncle’s favour had made him a rich man – the king had given him the Norman county of Mortain in the south-west of the duchy as well as valuable lands in England that made him one of the greatest of the Anglo-Norman nobility – but Stephen had had to work for his rewards. Mortain was a frontier lordship, while his English estates had been seized from magnates who had opposed Henry in the name of Robert Curthose and his son William Clito. Stephen’s personal interests – now inseparable from his loyalty to his uncle – therefore threw him into the fight against Clito and his followers.
    Years of campaigning in Normandy and Flanders had established Stephen’s reputation as an energetic and effective soldier, while his presence at Henry’s court as the king’s most favoured nephew made his name as a man of courtesy, generosity and charming good nature. The possibility that he might one day come closer still to the throne may even have been in Henry’s mind during the unsettling years between the wreck of the White Ship – in which Stephen had so nearly died – and Matilda’sunforeseen return from Germany as an imperial widow. Certainly, in early 1125 his power and wealth were exponentially increased when Henry arranged his marriage to Mathilde, heiress to the county of Boulogne, an alliance which brought him control of the vital cross-Channel trading route to the Low Countries, as well as vast estates in the south-east of England.
    If the thought that his nephew might succeed him had indeed occurred to Henry, it was summarily discarded after his daughter’s return. But Stephen had not been so quick to relinquish the idea. Beyond that, we cannot know for certain what he was thinking on his lightning dash across ice-cold water and frozen roads to snatch the crown for himself – what form his ambition took, or how he justified his actions, beyond the likelihood that he sought to keep the count of Anjou, a neighbour and bitter enemy of the counts of Blois, from taking power in his royal wife’s name. Nor can we be sure why Matilda made no greater effort, no more expansive move, to stake her claim. William of Malmesbury offers only the maddeningly opaque observation that she delayed any attempt to return to England ‘for certain reasons’. Was her health badly compromised by her pregnancy even in its earliest stages? Did she think the nobles who had knelt before her to swear their loyalty would simply rally to her cause, leaving her waiting at Argentan for acclamation that never came? Or was it the reverse, a